According to the Guardian readers’ editor this week:
As one Guardian journalist recently discovered, constructing an article from material you find on the web is unsafe – a solid-looking story can turn out to be the sort of edifice that collapses within days of its completion.
NO WAI, RLY?
We wanted to post this a week ago, but a combination of a flaky 3G internet connection and Blogger locking our account meant that it hasn’t appeared until today.
So let’s start with what we’re trying to do. We’re operating on a simple premise: the media manufactures reality, and so do we. The difference is that we tell you about it. So when we manufacture a tiny piece of reality, and the media turn it into True Fact, we’ll post it here.
Still not clear what we’re on about? Perhaps an example would help: our first hoax. It’s a small one, because we’re still learning, and we wanted to see if it would work. It worked.
On 31st March, a light plane crashed into a housing estate in Kent, England. The plane was a Cessna Citation. This much is true. But if you read The Sun, you’d also believe that Sir Alan Sugar owns a Cessna Citation.
He doesn’t. But because the Sun used Wikipedia as their reference, they picked up a change we had made to the Wikipedia entry about the aircraft.
Some spoilsport reverted our change after a few hours, but that’s fine: we’re not out to destroy Wikipedia, we’re just interested in manufacturing the media’s view of the world.
